MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578

There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.
Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.
Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.
This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.
It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?
There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.
He expanded the death penalty. True pro-lifers are against that.
I predict that support for abortion and support for the death penalty have a strong negative correlation. Do you predict the opposite or is there some other meaning to your claim?
It all depends on what the point of saying "America was built on slavery" is. My impression is that the goal of this movement is to establish that the USA's extraordinary economic prowess and status as the premier world power is due to (would not have existed without) its early reliance on slavery, rather than to its unique founding principles or constitution. If this is true, then the case for forfeiting its those founding principles to atone for the evils of slavery through e.g. reparations or affirmative action is strengthened.
I'm not sure I fully understand this, even a car mechanic won't give you a price up front, they'll give you an estimate, and sometimes, even with a machine, a repair doesn't go the way they expect, and your bill is higher than the estimate. Are you asking for medical care to have set, up-front pricing unlike car repair, or are you saying their estimates are significantly worse / harder to get?
When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad.
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
If any one municipality gets the solution to homelessness "correct" their reward for doing so is to be flooded by homeless people from other areas.
This is true only if homeless people have no agency to determine their place of residence, or if the solution is one that the homeless people themselves prefer to the default "unsolved" conditions.
If on the other hand there is a solution that the homeless people would prefer to avoid and they have some agency to avoid it by relocating, then the incentive would flow the opposite direction, with localities that do not adopt it getting flooded.
It seems pretty clear that Scott would favor a voluntary eugenics program and/or genetic engineering.
It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
I'm trying to wrap my head around what you are saying about the last sentence, you're saying that there is one word which expresses "switching channels will get you in trouble"? Or is the "switching channels" part just implied from context in the original Russian phrasing?
I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. Any enemy agents worth worrying about already have copies of it. So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find. Is there stuff in there that's just uncomfortable for the Pentagon to have widely known, or is it just an attempt to downplay the story by making the evidence harder to find?
There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).
For shipwrecks, the captain would certainly bear a lot of the responsibility. I don't know how rare captains getting murdered during shipwrecks was historically though.
It seems like substituting "Abrahamic religions" for "monotheistic religions" in your model makes it fit with fewer epicycles.
I would guess he had some perfect plan for how to destroy the gun without a trace that required him to be in a certain place.
We know that now but I think the sides had already been chosen before that became know several hours ago. I don't disagree that there is a special hatred for the insurance CEO but I don't feel that the overall reaction would have been any different if this had been any other major company's CEO, do you?
I think the comment makes more sense if you interpret "the regime" to be not identical to "the US government" but rather what's referred to as "the Cathedral" or "the elites", i.e. a class of people who comprise newspaper editors and politicians among others.
It's really pathetic how little progress the tech industry has apparently made towards measuring and incentivizing actual productivity, that some of the foremost employers still feel like they need to chain people to a desk and hope that they'll get something done that way. This is despite having approximately the most naturally conscientious workforce in the world.
Remote work aside, there is so much on the table for the employer that's able to keep the 10x software engineers and fire everyone else that it's mind-boggling how few companies have even tried to pull it off. I'm not sure if it's ideological commitment to egalitarianism, principal / agent problems where middle management pursues empire building instead of efficiency, or just genuinely that difficult of a problem to solve.
It seems like a progressive sales would inherently require tying your identity to every purchase, which seems like a huge inconvenience and a tough sell from a privacy perspective.
For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.
The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.
First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.
If you are a pacifist or have a principled objection to the state executing people in cold blood, by all means make that case, but abortion has absolutely nothing to do with it.
To interact with the case that you do make, I'm not sure if your slippery slope argument is supposed to apply to abortion / euthanasia only or to the death penalty as well. If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death. There's essentially no example one could look at of stepping onto the slippery slope since humanity has always existed on the supposed slope.
Your other support doesn't seem to be an argument but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens. I think it ought to be, because the only human justice possible for a murder is the execution of the murderer, and only the state is in a position to do this with due process which at least attempts to ensure that the guilty is punished rather than the weak. What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?
If responsibility is diffused between many different people in the process of executing someone, that's fine by me as long as the person is actually guilty. They should all feel good for having worked together to achieve the only earthly justice possible under the circumstances. The fact that, in the modern west, most of them don't feel good about it, because they aren't persuaded of the goodness of justice, is a hindrance to the system working well in practice, but not an argument that the death penalty is principally unjust.
By removing a small number of people from the streets we can have a drastic reduction in crime.
I think this is plausible but doesn't follow inevitably from the rest. Presumably the progressive response would be that the societal niche exists independently of the specific person who ends up filling it. Consider an analogous claim that, because 1% of people (fast food workers) do 90% of the deep frying in the US, we could improve obesity stats by removing a small number of people from the streets.
Your prediction is a useful one to distinguish between these hypotheses, but also hard to differentiate from a deterrent effect making crime less attractive (which we would also expect to see if we arrested all fast food workers).
When Jesus returns to Earth in The Grand Inquisitor he doesn't save the righteous or establish the kingdom of heaven, no Russian would've bought that, least of all Dostoevsky.
Is The Grand Inquisitor typically interpreted as being representative of Dostoevsky's views? My read has always been that Ivan represents the secular philosophy that Dostoevsky opposes.
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There might be a cultural dimension but a big part of it is that slowing to a stop and restarting is actually a significant inconvenience to a biker in a way that it's not to a driver since it requires a large expenditure of your personal physical energy.
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